Money Shot

""Armantrout is continually calling into question the language she uses, and these choices are always elegant and amazingly intelligent, but there is genuine emotion in these poems.""

~Nick Sturm, The Volta

"Her follow up to Versed, the prize-winning volume, is due out from Wesleyan University Press in February, and it's a stunner."

~Craig Teicher, Publishers Weekly

""Armantrout shows what a person with open eyes and open ears can contribute by organizing artifice and showing it for what it is - all the while maintaining a cleverness, intellectual authority and readability that make her one of the best page-poets in the world.""

~John Denning, Coldfront

""Rae Armantrout's 'Soft Money,' from Money Shot, transplants the language of sexual desire into the context of the current economic meltdown.""

~Tracy K. Smith, NPR.org

"underlying peacefulness of contemplation: 'It's well/ that things should stir/ inconsequentially/ around me.' Money Shot (Wesleyan) is a fine follow-up to Armantrout's Pulitzer Prize-winning Versed.""

~Jane Henderson, St. Louis Times Dispatch

""Even when she declares intellectualism, Armantrout gives us a strained, strange emotionalism; even as she alienates us, she suggests we are all—like the wheels of a tandem bicycle—spinning in sympathy nonetheless.""

~Abigail Deutsch, Poetry magazine

""there are a lot of possibilities. Which is exciting, and frighteningIndeed, the charged openness of language is itself enough to power these poems. What makes Money Shot such a success is Armantrout's ability to distill this linguistic energy without compromising the ability of these poems to make lucid associative connectionsLet's play a game, Armantrout seems to say. This game has to do with language, and either it will destroy us or leave us alone on a sunny day. Take your pick.""

~Nick Sturm, Laurel Review

""Armantrout's work is distinguished by, among other things, a sense of economy and elegant precision.""

~David Wheatley, Times Literary Supplement

""Her follow up to Versed, the prize-winning volume, is due out from Wesleyan University Press in February, and it's a stunner.""

~Craig Teicher, Publishers Weekly

""Working from a minimalist position, Armantrout has the ability to magnify the merest of words into an essay. True to the postmodern tradition, she gives no answer to the provocative questions she raises. Instead Money Shot offers sure proof of one thing: A well-wrought book of poems.""

~John Herbert Cunningham, Rain Taxi

"In a world of real justice, all speech would be sifted in Rae Armantrout's gold pan. In what may be her best book yet, the poems of Money Shot sort our sorry tropes and reveal the fool's gold with which we've smitten ourselves once again."

~Susan Wheeler, author of Ledger and Assorted Poems

"In a world of real justice, all speech would be sifted in Rae Armantrout's gold pan. In what may be her best book yet, the poems of Money Shot sort our sorry tropes and reveal the fool's gold with which we've smitten ourselves once again."

~Susan Wheeler, author of Ledger and Assorted Poems

"The breathtaking economy of these deftly crafted poems yields high dividends indeed. This is the real thing, no doubt about it.""

~Peter Nicholls, author of George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism